Grammys Boss Neil Portnow on Race, Boycotts, and Working with Washington

Every year towards the end of the Grammys, the president of the Recording Academy, Neil Portnow, gives a few wonkish remarks. It’s such a famously incongruous moment that this year’s Grammy host James Corden joke-introduced Kanye West before Portnow took the stage, just in case anyone was thinking of taking a bathroom break. During a show lightly punctuated by protests against President Trump, Portnow called on Washington “to help keep the music playing by updating music laws, protecting music education, and renewing America’s commitment to the arts.” The Academy doesn’t just hand out trophies, after all—this is a major industry group advocating for policies that benefit both creators’ rights and the record-biz bottom line.

In a call with Pitchfork late Monday, Portnow rejected the view that race is an issue for the Grammys. Portnow also revealed that Kanye was approached about possibly performing at this year’s awards, commented on Frank Ocean’s decision not to submit Blonde for the Grammys, discussed plans for working with the Trump administration, and more.

What did you think of this year’s Grammys in general?

We were incredibly pleased. It’s three and a half hours. It’s 20-plus performances. It felt like we really did hit almost all the marks of a high bar in excellence.

Any marks you felt like you didn’t hit? It seemed like there were a couple of little mistakes.

There were some technical errors. And we really regret and are not pleased when they happen. But I would say to anybody that’s watching, how many times did you go to do something at home or plug something into the wall and plug it in the wrong way? Or you put the wrong key in the door? So it’s human error, and these things do happen. Because of the complexity of what’s going on, it’s frankly amazing to me that there aren’t more issues than we have. It’s also the nature of live television. Whatever is going to happen is going to go out on the air.

A stat has been going around since the show, about how a black artist hasn’t won Album of the Year since Herbie Hancock in 2008. Do you think the Grammys has a race problem?

No, I don’t think there’s a race problem at all. Remember, this is a peer-voted award. So when we say the Grammys, it’s not a corporate entity—it’s the 14,000 members of the Academy. They have to qualify in order to be members, which means they have to have recorded and released music, and so they are sort of the experts and the highest level of professionals in the industry. It’s always hard to create objectivity out of something that’s inherently subjective, which is what art and music is about. We do the best we can. We have 84 categories where we recognize all kinds of music, from across all spectrums.

We don’t, as musicians, in my humble opinion, listen to music based on gender or race or ethnicity. When you go to vote on a piece of music—at least the way that I approach it—is you almost put a blindfold on and you listen. It’s a matter of what you react to and what in your mind as a professional really rises to the highest level of excellence in any given year. And that is going to be very subjective. That’s what we ask our members to do, even in the ballots. We ask that they not pay attention to sales and marketing and popularity and charts. You have to listen to the music. So of the 14,000 voters, they listen, they make up their minds, and then they vote.

Now here’s the other interesting part of the process, and we stand 100 percent behind the process: It’s a democratic vote by majority. So somebody could either receive or not receive a Grammy based on one vote. It could be that tight.

The Motion Picture Academy tookstepslast year to increase diversity among their voters. Is that something the Recording Academy is interested in doing?

Well, they may have had a problem. We don't have that kind of an issue in that same fashion. But we are always working on increase diversity in membership, whether it's ethnicity, gender, genre, or age. In order to maintain our relevance, we have to be refreshing all the time and we have to be doing that across the board.

We’re set up as chapters in 12 cities across the country, so we’re on the ground in each of those cities with staff. Each of these cities has a board of governors, which is volunteers who are again the professionals in the industry who give their time to the Academy, they get elected, it’s a vote among peers again. So each chapter has between 20 and 30 governors that are elected every year. Our board of trustees is 40 people, from all of the 12 chapters across the country. I think we have more elected leaders in the Academy than there are members of the House of Representatives. And the reason for that is to have diversity and broad participation in a very democratic and very open environment.

At the end of the day, we just went through a popular election, but you had the overlay of an electoral college. And so the popular vote doesn't necessarily in and of itself create the recipient of the election. In our case, the popular vote stands by itself and completely determines who receives an award in any given year. There certainly could be those that are disappointed and that had a difference of opinion about another artist than perhaps received a Grammy in any given year, but the fact is that they had a chance to vote. That's the way it came out.

And also, looking for more participation. I think maybe we’ve just seen this in the last national election to some degree. Sometimes people are perhaps disappointed at the results and then when asked, “Hey did you participate in this election?,” the answer is no. And then, it’s after the fact, not much you can do if you haven’t been a part of it. So to anybody that is unhappy with the results or even feels that there could be a stronger representation of any genre or ethnic group, bottom line is very simple. Just become members, join and vote. Then you have the say if you want it.

They're all different situations. Not everybody comes to the Grammys every year. There’s no requirement that they do it. There are all kinds of reasons why they don’t. I totally respect that. In the case of Drake, we know he had a European tour booked. That's a big piece of business for an artist, to do a continent. So, can’t argue with that.

Kanye, as you know, had some medical concerns and situations. We had dialog with him about actually performing. At the end of the day, what we had heard was he just wasn't in a place where he felt comfortable doing that. That’s completely understandable. And by the way, we hope both of them will be there, whether next year or the year after. They all have very long careers ahead of them.

Frank Ocean’s a different story, because he made a conscious decision to not enter his music in the process. I think that’s a personal choice. Not everybody likes or wants to be part of every organization or awards process. I respect that. What I’ll say about Frank is he did have his earlier album out at an early stage of his career, we were delighted that it was entered, we were delighted that he was a Grammy winner, we were delighted to have him on our stage, which gave him a platform very early in his career. That’s something we're proud of, and down the line he may feel differently. Artists change their opinion. I don’t begrudge his choice at all and we’ll see what the future brings.

There really isn’t a great mechanism for campaigning. You can take advertising during the entry period, just as some of the Hollywood publications have for-your-consideration advertising. But there’s no way of knowing if all our voters around the country subscribe to any of those publications. So in the case of Chance, clearly our members listened, liked what they heard, and felt that he was deserving of the Grammys that he won.

To your earlier question about a racial problem. The album, record, song and best new artist categories are ones that the entire voting membership is entitled to vote on. You don’t get Chance the Rapper as the Best New Artist of the year if you have a membership that isn’t diverse and isn’t open-minded and isn’t really listening to the music, and not really considering other elements beyond how great the music is.

People usually think of the Grammys when they think of the Academy, but how important is the advocacy side to what you do all year round?

It’s a huge part of our mission, and it’s actually grown dramatically over the past decade. At this point I would say we are certainly the leading advocates for creators in Washington on policy. That's not to say that there aren’t others who do a phenomenal job and work for their constituents, but in those cases many of them have a more defined constituency: music publishers, the writers, record labels. We are that one organization that represents the entire creative community.

There’s obviously been quite a bit of change in Washington. How much do you plan to work with the current administration?

We have found that many of our issues really are nonpartisan. What we’ll need to do most immediately here is the education process for those that are new in Washington, whether it’s congresspeople or the executive branch. They don’t necessarily have all the background on our issues and we’ll need to make sure that they have accurate information and understand what’s, no question, a fairly complicated ecosystem. But that being said, we’ll work with the Congress and the President as much as possible to further issues we think are important.